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- which of them would not be penalized by google on the grounds of hidden text?

The reason I ask is that I have a site that is currently implementing the first div styling, but if you either remove the image OR uncheck the repeat-x (in inspect element) the text is left as white on white.

I have added the transparent image on green to prove that having a background colour to back up the tiled image is not always going to work. What can be done in this scenario?

5 Responses

To clarify, the content in question was footer links on my clients site.

It sounds like the consensus is that the approaches I have in the example should be fine as my intention is not to deceive and only visitors (most likely competition) would flag this manually if it was.

What remains unanswered is that the last two examples on my test page will still create issues.

The third example inadvertently has a transparent section of the background image where text exists. You can see this if you click/drag over the middle section. I would imagine this would get flagged by visitors as hidden text (as it currently shows white text on white), but aside from offering a complimentary background colour to either the div element or the entire site (say a pastel colour) is there a better way to manage this than the fourth example (where I have simply offer a fallback green colour. This looks pretty bad)?

Ultimately, I don't think this would be a problem on an otherwise non spammy site. There is generally a big difference between a site that is using a set of spammy or manipulative techniques and one that makes a simple mistake like this so I doubt you have much to worry about if everything else is as it should be.

That said, I guess the simple question here is:

If you are using a background image and white text, why not use a background colour as well?

This would address the obvious usability issues relating to the image not displaying and clarify that there is no bad intention here to trick anything. Better for users, better for search engines, better for your SEO penalty related anxiety issues. ;)

Dan the rule of thumb is if the text is readable and not purposelessly hidden then you're safe. The operative word there is purposelessly.

I will also add that in general crawlers are not going to find these types of problems rather they are reported by users or more often than not your competition. From there search engines may have a human evaluate the report and make a manual ruling.

Ok the thing is, if text is humanly readable, you are safe. Just because you are using white texts and then something goes wrong with the style and the texts go invisible for a few days will not necessarily get your website banned. However, here I am assuming that you are not stuffing keywords there :)

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